An air-conditioning system in an office/commercial building or other structures is required to run optimally on the whole through cooperation among various air-conditioning apparatus that are components of the air-conditioning system, while maintaining an indoor environment that is felt comfortable to a person in the room. Through prediction of the indoor environment accurately, each type of load to be processed by the air-conditioning system is figured out and efficient operation can be determined for each apparatus. Several methods such as ones given below have hitherto been proposed as methods of predicting an indoor environment and an air-conditioning load (see Patent Literature 1 to Patent Literature 3, for example).
In Patent Literature 1, there is disclosed a building air-conditioning heat load prediction device in which the amount of heat taken in from walls, the amount of heat taken in from glass surfaces, the amount of heat generated by human body, the amount of heat generated by an electric apparatus, and the amount of any other heat that is generated or taken in are calculated by inputting the outside temperature, the amount of solar radiation, a head count fluctuation pattern, and other types of information to a building air-conditioning heat load model, and past heat load performance data is used in combination with the calculated heat amounts to predict a building air-conditioning heat load. In Patent Literature 2, there is disclosed a building ventilation amount and temperature prediction system configured to predict a ventilation amount and a temperature in a building by calculating the ventilation amount and temperature of each room a number of times in an alternating manner based on house-by-house data, which includes the shape and opening of each room, and meteorological data, which includes the wind velocity and the outside air temperature, until the calculated ventilation amounts and temperatures are converged. In Patent Literature 3, there is disclosed an air-conditioning control device configured to estimate the number of people in a room from a measured CO2 concentration value, predict a heat load dependent on estimated heat generation by human body or on the estimated number of people, and control an air-conditioning apparatus based on the estimated heat load.